skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An argument against not being allowed to import more people after layoffs (and it’s the one people like PG and Musk are making) is that the people who were laid off simply don’t have the skills required to allow companies to succeed.

They need to import labor because the domestic labor pool isn’t good enough. A quieter part is that people immigrating also expect less for their outputs.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-summa...
if we were to provide sensible landlord/tenant laws this idea could be helpful. BUT (big BUT) I lost faith than a senisble laws can be enacted in the USA. In more liberal places the laws are written so extreme that it makes you question your sanity if you are a landlord. in other more conservative places - the landlords are true Lords!

I am a landlord in a place which is liberal. I will keep my place vacant for months against a mountain of applications until I find someone which I feel comfortable with signing a lease (that bar is HIGH). My place is dirt cheap, I have 3% interest on a place I bought after real estate crash and I only charge enough to cover my mortgage and condo fees (could easily charge additional $1.5k/month). I would be 100% more open to signing a lease with someone who needs an afforable place A LOT more than my current and former tenants but with the present laws I have to deal with there is absolutely no way that will ever happen
The proof is in the profits that result from a favorable and otherwise illogical set of choices. Who even cares about the details? The oil and related industries are notoriously corrupt, introducing lead into gas knowing the toxic effects among other policy choices aimed at reducing alternatives to cars such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Where's the logical argument against high speed rail that is based on physical limitations of reality and not simply uh its infeasible because policy?
There are jurisdictions that have done things like this. British Columbia is one that introduced a "Speculation Tax" that was largely a tax on empty homes, with the tax levy being very significant for secondarily owned homes being left empty.

The net result is that it added thousands of rentals onto the market! https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/metro-vancouver-rental-housi...

A very good thing but notably this is mostly a one time increase in homes (though the tax continues to incentivize newly built condos to be rented).

So it's a good emergency sort of measure that absolutely helps with a supply shortfall, but in the long term there needs to be followthrough in more systemic policies to build more homes.
I bring up misogyny because it has to do with the glass in question, and use the example of the pyramids, to show that my opinion is principle over message. Don’t tamper with history, good message or not, unless absolutely necessary.

> The Nazis by the way, intended to destroy Notre Dame together with the rest of Paris.

Hitler did; the Nazis on the ground refused.
Don't bet on AI staying clean.

A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked.

It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart.

And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules.

And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did.

Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.
Infestation also applies to actual "organic" results. The old Google philosophy would have ranked pages with annoying pop-ups, paywalls, sign-in walls etc out of existence. Today's Google does not. They even tolerate sites that show them articles to index but are then hidden from the general public behind a paywall.

The old Internet still exists, but Google's ranking behaviour hides it.
The excluded middle here is a paid tier that nevertheless serves you ads :(
I sometimes like it, but I've gotten very skeptical of it. One day a friend and I searched the exact same question in Google and got opposing answers for the identical search string. Thus wasn't in the "AI" widget, but one of their usual widgets that give answers to questions. I assume both use some form of AI anyway.
There were real bugs and there was a real possibility of major disruption. We were spared because of mobilization of resources and the dedication of the programmers involved.
(Without derailing the topic, I hope you are doing better now! You sound level headed and like someone we want in this world or on our jobs or in our friend groups.)

I mostly figured the same as what you said (way too much infrastructure needed to mostly eliminate the possibility), though if you say most suicides are impulse decisions, wouldn't preventative infrastructure in a few key spots be sufficient to shave, idk, 10+% off the number of suicides by train?
> it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves

You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.

Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
Let me rephrase then: average Latin American cities in many countries are comparable to average US cities.

There are trouble hotspots (and countries) just as there are trouble hotspots in the US.

It's not true that Latin America as a whole is "unsafe". It's not Ciudad Juárez everywhere. I live in Buenos Aires and there's crime comparable to any big city (with better and worse periods, of course).
The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly bias towards referrals and managers towards people they personally know. And, from some conversations I've had, that is exactly what is happening. With the result that it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK maybe their school is a signal) because companies really don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I don't really blame them.
Echoing this experience.

I moved AUS->UK for family reasons, didn’t start applying till we landed and settled. Had a remote contract signed within two months at “big tech” for 97th percentile income locally.

20ish apps total, only 5ish got past resume screening, bombed one, turned down two, one couldn’t afford me, one accepted, no referrals, only applying for Sr IC roles, ~30yo, ~10yoe, no dei, admittedly have a degree unlike op

All up I was left doubting the jobs downturn, anecdote ofc :shrug:
And fourth maybe don't name and shame the poor salesperson.
Yes – people forget that during the Jobs era, he was very transparent that Apple's secret sauce was almost obessively focusing on thoughtfully executed tentpole products, but otherwise having nearly conventional org structure and culture (modulo Jobs letting managers internally poach people for secret new projects.)

The fact that Apple now depends a lot on services for profitability has changed their priorities and ethos quite a bit, and I think the late-2010s depths of shitty hardware and software QA demonstrated that.
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> any perceived layoffs of white males at tech companies is just correlation with their overrepresentation in the software engineer population

Whites are 41% of software engineers [1], but 57% of the US population [2], so they are under-, not over-, represented.

[1] https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/software-engineer/dem...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of interviewing/hiring for 13 years.

I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.

For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than usual.

We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.

Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants dropped and the process felt more normal.

I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to enforcing on-site for my group.
Microsoft also provides a lot of software and services to governments (including, but not limited to Windows and Office). Maybe just the prospect of training an entire civil service to use LibreOffice is just that scary to the paper pushers.

The only government I know, other than a few German state or local governments, that seems even a bit interested in avoiding a complete MS lock in is China, and then only fairly recently.
Agree.

It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the company and just bypassed the initial resume screening altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter with a strong backing from people that knew me.

I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.
The hyperinflation gallery: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/hyper/
I think this is an important factor. Developer salaries have been bimodal or trimodal [1]. I have really good former colleagues who have difficulty finding jobs, but they are looking for 120k+ USD/Euro jobs (remote, outside SV). I also have friends owning companies, having difficulty filling positions, but they are in the 50k-70k USD/Euro range.

It seems like the difficulty of finding a job is in the second mode. But the people who had jobs in that mode are hesitant to apply in jobs corresponding to the first mode, not only because the pay gap is substantial, but it can also be bad for one's resume and perhaps less satisfying intellectually.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
>maybe Turkey (which is technically a NATO member but not in particularly friendly terms with the West) decides that it is allowed to control access to the Black Sea

Interestingly, Turkey is allowed -- by the Montreux Convention -- to close the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to warships and in fact have been doing so since 2022:

>Turkey has closed off the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to warships from any country, whether or not they border the Black Sea, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The strait closures will still allow warships through if they are returning to a home base in the Black Sea, according to reporting from Naval News. This would include Russian ships in the country’s Black Sea Fleet. However, the decision to restrict warships, a power given to Turkey by the Montreux Convention of 1936, will likely limit Russia’s ability to move ships from its other fleets to the Black Sea.

https://news.usni.org/2022/02/28/turkey-closes-bosphorus-dar...
No it shouldn't be lol
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but did you consider dyeing your beard a different colour?
If such a ban is in power, many companies will either close or move abroad. It's as simple as that.
I agree, it will be totally destructive.
Do they really? I have some black slacks that are 10 year old hand-me-downs from a relative and they look fine. My dress shirt for multiple years was a $5 second hand purchase - and I got more compliments on that shirt than on the ones that I got new.
This is the narrow perspective I was referring to. There are border crossings in the world where there is no reliable electricity, and laptops/smartphones are a rare luxury. Starlink is not a solution to these problems.
Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating worse outcomes for everyone.

Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.
So, I must ask for definitions. I found late 2023 and early 2024 very difficult for finding employment (I work as a freelance/consultant/temp programmer), whereas both early 2023 and late 2024 I did get some significant amount.

I know others who are white males like me, and they also found late 2023 and early 2024 to be more challenging than lately.

I should also mention that as a young man I would apply for any job in my chosen field, whereas now I look for jobs that are not just programming, but the kind of programming I wish to do (for example, in my particular case I don't like front-end and I like machine learning but am turned off by what looks like AI-hype in company descriptions). So, am I finding it harder because I am pickier? Or is it actually harder because my standards are higher, because I am fortunate enough that I can (for now, anyway) afford to be picky?

In any case, I found late 2024 to be better than the 12 months before that.
Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I only really use it because it can read the results to me which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's that.
“Drastically”

Common, everyone cried at all the demons when Trump asked Europe to reach 2% of GDP on military spending in 2018. Had we done it, we’d have DOUBLED our spending.

Russia is at 6.3%, USA at 3.4% (7x Russia’s in absolute spending), Europe at 1.3%.

Culture-wise, it’s unthinkable for Europe to come around and revive the military-industrial complex. We’re basically trying to win this war by crossing our fingers, like the French did in 1936 (the famous Congés Payés were offered in 1936, with beautiful photos of parisians going to the beach, while our German cousins were in factories manufacturing guns. Guess who won the war).
The reason is that there is tons of money still flowing, because accounting is an industry that is easy to pitch to an investor in 2024.

1. It touches everyone
2. Everyone finds it annoying
3. Everyone thinks they pay too much
4. AI (still sexy) can fix the above

Unfortuntely, we're still decades from strong products.

I wouldn't touch any of these companies with a ten foot pole if I was a consumer or investor.
I somewhat disagree with you about CS degrees. Though my data points are a bit dated. (And a couple academic CS acquaintances feel that there's are department level declines.)

But the standard curriculum I'm familiar with always includes courses where you need to use C, or similar low level languages, to write an OS, compilers, networking stack, etc. And at least one course focused on a system language as a pre-req for those. The push for more practical coursework I think is perceived to have come from industry, which generally would rather have someone who can string some python packages together to do something quickly than someone who's never touched python but can write a compiler or OS from scratch.

That said, I do think it seems like ML topics should fit into standard coursework (wasn't really a thing when I was in school - AI was maybe an occasional elective or grad topic). It seems pretty adjacent to parallel and distributed computing (don't remember if that was optional or required) and statistics, which was not precisely part of CS curriculum, but occasionally discrete math/algo/grammar track adjacent in practice.

But I have trouble seeing how that could fit into 3 years. It's hard to parallelize the intro series of courses that build up to the "fan out" to he higher level courses/reqs, (though maybe stats/ML intro could fit early) and once you hit the fan out, 3 courses take about 80/hrs a week for most of a semester. IMO if you're wanting foundational knowledge and not the "patch Python packages together" it's hard to compress.

One thing that is happening is non-CS degrees with weaker requirements to get to people skills, like BAs in technology and computing, that focus much more lightly on CS and just have a solid amount of "practical" coursework, e.g. "here's how to use the most common Python ML libraries and Django, BTW this would be a great thing to double major in with Bio."
Europe isn't a homogeneous block in this question, though. Some parts do what GP said, IMO.

For example, Germany also increased its military spending, true - but from a low starting point, with an army even sometimes lacking basic supplies like dumb ammunition due to massive underfunding since the end of the cold war.

The (possible, maybe!) reintroduction of drafting will be agonizingly slow, as the military doesn't have the capacity anymore (and will lack it for years to come!) to even examine even a small percentage of each year, let alone equip and train them. There are no KWEAs (Kreiswehrersatzämter, drafting centers) anymore, and the new "Career Centers" have abysmal throughput.

We sold a very very significant chunk of our military bases and heavy equipment. Those are gone, the federal government often doesn't even own the land anymore. We have almost no working bunkers anymore, both military and public. Etc, etc.

Those are things which we would have to start to change immediately, as it takes ages until we see results. We do sorta, but on a tiny scale - it's not the massive investment you would expect for a country readying itself for conflict.

German politics / state departments are, IMO, in no way readying the public for the real prospect of military conflict. Pistorius, the German defence minister, basically screams into the void. Yes, many agree in talk, but the walk is quite underwhelming.

The defence ministry says we have to be ready for war until 2029. Most projects which are started now will, based on information by the same ministry, never ever be finished until before the 2030s. And yet, there is no hurry visible. We still have time.
You can always migrate.
Think it's a confluence of a couple separate things:

* End of ZIRP

* Musk's twitter firing spree being watched & emulated by others. i.e. there was rest & vest happening & execs realised some fat can be cut

* Bootcamp generation has moved beyond entry level and is now competing with more established players

* Entire thing just naturally goes in waves

* More fractured/specialised field. Language/Framework/Job description feels like things are more granularly sliced these days

* AI whether real or illusionary has some execs focused on things other than "lets hire humans"
Comic Operas are a different genre, for the most part you won’t find them in the repertory for the major world operas. Gilbert and Sullivan only overlapped with the end of Verdi’s career — they were very much a retrograde move in the artistic evolution of the medium.
Whoopsie, guess OpenAI et al broke a few million ToSes while training their models!
I doubt that was the decision process. It’s much more likely that there is a directive coming down from the top that “we need to go all in on AI”, which then gets amplified down by middle management and the result is AI smeared over all results irregardless if helpful. That then drives up some vanity metric like “searches answered by AI summaries”, while metrics like “bad AI summaries shown” don’t get attention. As a result the organization is happy, people can get promoted, etc.
Here's the source. There were actual-court cases which found that oil and car manufacturers conspired to monopolize and convert local public transit to buses from rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

"Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[a] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry."

This history also plays a large role in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," as a bit of fun bonus lore...
Ruby-refrigerator: Freeze all core Ruby classes
thanks for the feedback!, that's something I haven't though of!